I already have an Elgato StreamDeck XL and a Tangent Wave2, but am always interested in something to speed up my editing workflow, so have been interested in the $169 TourBox Neo External Controller. The review is interesting and it sounds decent, but I am not sure I would go for it, especially since it doesn’t work with DaVinci’s color page, but it does sound good in Premiere.
Sometimes your Mac is running badly and needs some maintenance, now there are a couple of paid utilities I fall back to (mainly TechTool and Diskwarrior, but I will post more about those later) but the first I run is always the free OnyX. Onyx is a GUI or graphical user interface for various terminal utilities. It is from Titanium Software and has different versions for each version of the OS.
I always go to Maintenance and usually run everything except disk positions on desktop. It will quit all open apps and run. And the run will take a while, maybe even an hour depending on hard drive size, then will restart your machine.
I run this when Premiere is being sketchy, lots of crashes, and the system just seems to be running wrong. It isn’t a utility for Premiere, but for your system overall.
I have posted how this is needed in Premiere immediately, but i ran across this article by Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition. I hadn’t realized that Final Cut Pro X had added it, and didn’t realize you can read the metadata in Premiere, just not easily, and it should be appended to the tracks in the timeline just like it is DaVinci Resolve.
This is a feature that Adobe needs to add immediately.
I have already made a couple of posts about Productions, but had to write again with a quick update.
I am currently cutting a 28 minute and 30 second full length infomercial. And it is a legacy project from 2017, with many versions, and tons of footage. When I first got the project it took over 10 minutes to open and was almost unresponsive when trying to use it.
I decided to see how Productions would handle it.
Productions offers you tools for organizing multi-project workflows, sharing assets between projects, and keeping everything streamlined and efficient, whether you’re working on your own or collaborating with a team.
From the Adobe Help Manual for Premiere Pro.
Now I am working from home and not sharing projects, but basically am using productions like AVID uses Bins. So breaking up the project into the categories it was already broken up into, that means Sequences, Footage, Graphics, Audio, Stills, ETC. So each what would have been a folder in a premiere project is it’s own project.
And premiere can access the media from these projects as if they were open within sequences.
It is amazing how much this speeds up a large project. Everything moves like it should. And like AVID you have the safety of each bin being it’s own project in case something gets corrupted, so you are really safe especially if you backup every day as you must.
Honestly with this and Speech to TEXT AVID should be shaking.
Now if only Adobe fixes Merge clips, this will be the ultimate editing program.
Eric Philpott at the Adobe Blog has a report on the latest Pfeiffer Benchmark Reports of Adobe Premiere Pro on Apple Silicon M1, and the results are pretty unbelievable.
From first launch to final exports, everything is faster — on average 77 percent faster than comparable Intel-based systems — and editing is buttery smooth.
Launch 50 percent faster, Open projects 77 percent faster, Save projects 168 percent faster, Gradient wipe effect 90 percent faster, Lens Flare effect 66 percent faster.
Wow, those are seriously impressive results, and would speed up the edit every day. I can’t wait to see what the M2 or even M3 will do, especially if they really goose the graphics cores and allow for more RAM. I am getting more and more excited for an M1 MacPro, even with limited expansion. I mean I have been pretty damn happy with my iMac Pro.
Check it out at the ProVideoCoalition, it is extensive and well worth a read.
Jarle Leirpoll, the author of the book Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro and who runs the awesome site Premiere Pro.net, has written an absolute must read article at Frame.io on Premiere Pro’s Render and Bit Depth settings.
Honestly after all these years of using Premiere Pro I didn’t know exactly how all these settings work and when they are affecting things, and Jarle really goes into depth and he ran extensive tests on everything to prove it.
This really should be essential reading for any Premiere Pro user, and his open letter to Adobe is so true, and I just hope they listen. The whole thing should be simplified, which would quickly solve so many users issues with banding on exports.
I don’t know if any people were reading my blog posts of late, but it can’t be many as the links were broken. I was using google’s blogger as the back end, and using a plug-in in Rapidweaver to show my blog, but the plug in like all of it’s predecessors is no more, and hasn’t been working right. It was added a comma in the rss feed to my blog, and I couldn’t fix it. And even weirder is that the links worked fine on my machine, so I couldn’t tell it was broken (thanks Tom).
I decided to move the blog to WordPress, and have been using a plug-in to show my movie reviews within the Rapidweaver site, but it just isn’t that good. So I moved the blog completely to jonahleewalker.com but will show the latest posts on my jonahlee.com front page.
A self hosted WordPress is just so much more powerful than blogger. It has extensive plug-in support, and with google’s feedburner also being gone, much getter RSS support. So overall the blog should be better. The RSS feed is here.
After my last post on Productions I also had to post this great guide from editor, writer and workflow expert Sofi Marshall, who I posted about her work from home streaming setup previously, THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PRODUCTIONS: PREMIERE PRO’S MOST UNDERRATED NEW FEATURE.
This is a great read from someone who obviously has used this extensively and will really get you up and going with a feature that you should be using if you have a project of any size.
So I was just given a huge direct response, and the 300 MB project barely functioned, just beachballing when I tried to do anything. In fact I couldn’t even get it to copy and paste the contents into a new project, it just would beachball and nothing would happen. It was basically a disaster of a project and with a 28 minute and 30 second infomercial I really needed it to be sprightly since I am new jumping into it.
I considered just getting the sequence I was working on out, and did that, but it was a mess, and I would need to search through footage to cover different things, so I really the whole project.
So I tried Productions. You can read it about it here in the Adobe Premiere Pro Manual.
Basically I started a new Production and imported my existing project, which took a while to work, as the project was so messed up. I then broke the project up into smaller little projects as bins, and now a project that was taking 10+ minutes to open, opens in 15 seconds and works better than I could have ever expected!
This basically turns Premiere Pro into AVID, where each Bin is it’s own little project file. So if you are well organized you can break up a project and make little manageable pieces that you only need to open when you need to, to save memory. And you can use folders and break things up even more granularly, so multiple footage bins if you need it.
This is also for multi-user workflows as you can have some bins that open read only and others that you have read write, so you can find footage and not even own a bin, but it works just as well for a single user on a big project.
Honestly should be very scared of Productions, because it fixes one of the longstanding complaints about Premiere Pro where it is a single project that can get messed up. Instead it is a folder of projects all working together. WOW!
Honestly if you are doing a large project in Premiere I would consider using Productions because it speeds everything up and really just works.
This is easily the biggest improvement I have seen in years in Premiere Pro, and really pushes it to new professional heights.
Awesome.